Windows 7 Release Candidate Update — There certainly has been a lot of discussion about Windows 7 in the last few weeks. A lot of folks want to know when they can get their hands on the official RC, when we are going to RTM, and what I had for breakfast.

Windows 7 RC 32-bit vs. Vista SP1 32-bit - Gaming shootout — Is it worth upgrading your Vista gaming rig to Windows 7? Will you see any performance benefits? Let's find out! — Let's look at what kind of frames per second (FPS) performance we get from the two operating systems using four different graphics cards.

Coming Soon: Windows XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC — Windows XP Mode is specifically designed to help small businesses move to Windows 7. Windows XP Mode provides you with the flexibility to run many older productivity applications on a Windows 7 based PC.

How To Overhype Your Search Engine — After covering search for 13 years, I'm more than a little jaded. I've seen any number of search start-ups promise to revolutionize how we search. None of them have in the huge way they've promised, other than Google — and it's a special case.

Journalists: Where do you add value? — Every day, with everything they do, the key question for journalists and news organizations in these tight - that is, more efficient - times must be: Are you adding value? And if you're not, why are you doing whatever you're doing?

Raising Bill Gates — SEATTLE — Spend time with the family of Bill Gates, and eventually someone will mention the water incident. — The future software mogul was a headstrong 12-year-old and was having a particularly nasty argument with his mother at the dinner table.

Hackers: the China Syndrome — For years, the U.S. intelligence community worried that China's government was attacking our cyber-infrastructure. Now one man has discovered it's worse: It's hundreds of thousands of everyday civilians. And they've only just begun — At 8 a.m. on May 4 …

FBI Arrests Oklahoma Teabagger For Twitter Threats — An Oklahoma City man who announced on Twitter that he would turn an April 15 tax protest into a bloodbath was hit with a federal charge of making interstate threats last week, in what appears to be first criminal prosecution to stem from posts on the microblogging site.

Twitter Clients Are a UI Design Playground — Twitter's elevation into the mainstream has, predictably, spawned a backlash against the service. To paraphrase the great Yogi Berra, “Nobody uses Twitter anymore; there are too many people using it.” — The most interesting product …